The report shows that there is plenty of room for growth. Of course, we know Andy Beal already gets it (insert blatant Trackur social media monitoring tool plug here) but now it’s up to companies to get it more as well.

With 43% of the respondents having no plan to respond to any online comments it’s obvious that more business people need to understand this process before it is too late. There are many instances of companies and organizations having to scramble to respond to online issues and concerns. While doing something is usually better than doing nothing it is still very risky to have to put together a response on the fly when just some prior planning could prevent some seriously poor performance.

The study also looked at what companies are using to monitor the social space and most are still depending on search engine alerts which, in this space, is quickly becoming the equivalent of using smoke signals to communicate.

Since we are on the subject, be sure to check out the Trackur blog for even more information about the discipline of social media monitoring.

NOTE: One piece of monitoring we would like to do is to see what our readers think of this weekend’s Super Bowl. Who are the Pilgrims rooting for? Let us know in the comments. For me, it’s Go, Pack, Go! What about you?

Of course, it’s not really surprising that many organizations don’t even use Google Alerts or anything similar, not to mention your specialty applications. Many of us that work with tools like Radian6 don’t do the best job of explaining how it can be used to support an organization’s goals, and I know that we have all seen plenty of circumstances where an organization has been sold some sort of expensive monitoring package that really had no benefit for the organization due to it being overpriced for them, not having the right focus, no one to manage it and provide analysis, etc, etc, etc.

Great to see a bit of direction out there on social media monitoring. Just trying to see a reason at present why an SMB would use a paid for product when google provides the majority of services for free?